Ballon d'Or Without Pedri and Raphinha: A Ballot With No Clear Law

I was sitting in front of a screen in Hai Phong, close to midnight, watching the 30-man Ballon d'Or shortlist appear line by line. The feeling was familiar, the same one I get inside a VAR room: the images are on the screen, but nobody has drawn a line. Pedri was absent. Raphinha was absent. In Catalonia the reaction arrived faster than a counter-attack down the wing. Alfredo Martinez of Sport called the list a “marketing product” and said some omissions were “too obvious to argue about”. I read the piece through, then read it again. What made me stop was not the absence of two Barcelona players. It was that across the entire article, not a single clause was quoted.

In seven years running a rules column in Hai Phong, I developed one professional habit: whenever a decision is called wrong, open the source text first. To say a referee erred, I must show which clause of Law 12 he breached. To say a ballot erred, you need an equivalent standard. That standard does exist for this award — it is simply written too faintly.

The Ballon d'Or is run by France Football, part of the Amaury group. The 30-man shortlist is chosen by the magazine's editorial staff. Roughly 100 journalists representing nations in the upper reaches of the FIFA ranking then vote, each selecting five players on a 6-4-3-2-1 scale. France Football publishes three criteria: individual performance and decisiveness; team achievements at club and national-team level; and class and fair play.

The criteria are fine as language. The problem is that they carry no weighting, no operational definition, and no appeals mechanism.

That is the fundamental difference from the competition laws I monitor every week. IFAB writes the Laws, but there are practical guidelines, scenario examples, and a referee's written justification. At award level, only the final result is published. The loser does not know where he lost, by how many votes, or on which criterion. A system like that does not need to be bought to generate controversy. It only needs to be opaque.

This argument is not new. In 2026, Wesley Sneijder won the treble with Inter Milan and reached the World Cup final, then missed the top three. Andres Iniesta scored the decisive goal in the 2026 World Cup final and did not win either. Deep-lying playmakers keep being pushed to the margins while forwards are favoured. It repeats every cycle, until it becomes an unwritten law.

The Ballon d'Or problem is not a wrong ballot; it is a set of criteria that cannot measure what it claims to measure.

Look at the positional profiles. Pedri is a central controlling midfielder — receiving from the back line, pivoting, setting tempo, breaking pressing lines with vertical passes. Raphinha is a wide attacker — creating chances, stretching width, contributing to both finishing and creation. They share one trait: most of their value does not sit in the goals column. It sits in metrics ordinary viewers do not count — progressive passes, receptions under pressure, chances created from the final third.

France Football's three criteria, with no weighting, collapse automatically toward the easiest thing to measure. In football, the easiest things to measure are goals and trophies. A voter has one ballot and a short memory; he is pulled toward the numbers on the scoreboard and the cups being lifted. A midfielder who dictates beautifully still struggles to become a readable line on a voting slip.

I have seen this mechanism at a smaller scale. When I built a “fairness index” to compare referee form before each V.League round, I learned something: people only trust metrics they can count with their eyes. Whistle counts, red cards, stoppage minutes — all easier to count than the quality of a non-decision. A referee who lets a game flow appears on no statistical table. In individual awards, the controlling midfielder is that referee.

In 2026 I was allowed into the VAR operations room in Qatar for the World Cup semi-final, watching semi-automated offside technology run in real time. Offside error fell from 0.4 metres to 0.1 metres. What I learned was not about the technology but about how error is handled: every threshold was defined in advance, every step documented. An award with no pre-defined threshold cannot be argued with data — only with belief.

A refereeing error is never an isolated event — it is a progress report on the entire rulebook. Whether Pedri and Raphinha deserved inclusion cannot be settled by arguing over two names. It has to be settled by re-reading which type of player the criteria reward. A rulebook that pushes playmakers out of the contest will repeat that outcome in every generation, whoever sits in the voting room.

France Football does publish the detailed ballots after the ceremony. So post-hoc review exists. But post-hoc review after the result is fixed changes nothing — it is like releasing the VAR footage after the match has ended. Transparency without any capacity to correct is just a late explanation.

That is also why I avoid the word “fix” here. To accuse, you must show a process was broken. Here the process was not broken. It was merely written too carelessly.

Catalan framing contains a telling rhetorical move: “thanks, Barcelona does not want it”. It converts a defeat into a voluntary refusal — we chose not to want it, rather than being left out. That is a classic dignity-recovery device in sports media, and it works emotionally.

But it has two blind spots. First, Sport is a media product with a publicly declared regional alignment. When a regional paper is furious that regional players were overlooked, readers should treat it as oriented opinion, not as an audit report. Second, the article itself labels several names on the list as questionable. Swapping one set of names for another, without data, is the same old game: sentiment trading places with sentiment.

There is an under-discussed layer of interest. A place in the 30 is not only an honour. It is a line in a contract negotiation file, an entry in a commercial bonus clause, a plus in a personal brand dossier. Clubs and agents hold a material stake in the outcome. I raise that not to accuse anyone, but to give the debate its proper weight: this is an interest dispute expressed in the language of justice.

People see an overlooked player; I see a clause written in haste. And a clause written in haste cannot be fixed by an editorial.

Three reforms are available immediately. Publish the weighting of the criteria before voting, rather than three vague sentences. Publish the voter list and the selection method for voters before the ceremony, not after. And split the categories: one for finishers, one for creators and controllers — as many modern statistical systems already do.

If the organisers choose to do nothing, that is acceptable too — as long as they stop calling the award a measure of truth. A media award is entitled to be a media award. Trouble only begins when it is draped in the authority of a verdict.

Changing a law takes ten minutes; admitting a law was wrong takes ten years. The Ballon d'Or has run for nearly seven decades without once declaring its own criteria faulty. A good referee is not one who never errs — but one who makes the law question itself. At Lach Tray stadium I once watched a referee change how he handled a match after a technical meeting. In Paris, nobody has done the same with a ballot.